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Bruce Schneier posts on a story being reported in the Seattle Intelligencer. Greek and U.S. officials in Greece apparently had their phones tapped for over a year before the 2004 Olympics. From the article: "It was not known who was responsible for the taps, which numbered about 100 and included Greek Prime Minister Costas Caramanlis and his wife, and the ministers of foreign affairs, defense, public order and justice. Most of Greece's top military and police officers were also targeted, as were foreign ministry officials and a U.S. embassy number. Also tapped were some journalists and human rights activists." Schneier gives a bit of technical background on how the tapping was accomplished.

You don't tap foreign officials for things to be "admissible in court" - you tap them so that you get the information of what their plans are. Of course, in some states no-party phone taps are legal (I believe that Arizona is one - I'd have to recheck) if you own the phone service, and in most states one-party phone taps are legal (tough luck people of California, Connecticut, Delaware, Florida, Massachusetts, Maryland, Michigan, Montana, New Hampshire, Pennsylvania, and Washington who want to tap a phone call that they're taking part of). None of these would cover tapping someone who'se phone you didn't own, but then again, the federal government tapping a foreign government's phones doesn't fall under the jurisdiction of domestic wiretap law.

Really, though, is this such a surprise? I'd think a foreign government would have to be bloody daft to accept any sort of tech built in the US where any sensitive communication is going to take place. You can make a no-click phone tap from a modem; you think that the US government can't do better? Or do you think that the Bush admin has the scruples not to tap its allies?

Interesting. I'm in Texas, so I looked up the appropriate statute. Here's a snippet:Under the statute, consent is not required for the taping of a non-electronic communication uttered by a person who does not have a reasonable expectation of privacy in that communication. See definition of "oral communication," Texas Code Crim. Pro. Art. 18.20.

Now, I wonder just how closely they define "electronic communication"? Ignoring the fact that even a basic Bell telephone is electronic communication (as is a tape

The way I understand it (IANAL, but am married to one), IP telephony and PBX calls can be recorded without notification to the person you are talking to, as they're still defined, rather loosely I'd say, as voice traffic. Now, whether or not this remains the case once elected officials start looking more closely at IP telephony due to the screams and howls of their well-funded telco lobbyists remains to be seen. I have a sneaky suspicion that the people who are most likely object to one-way recording are

Now, I wonder just how closely they define "electronic communication"?Wonder no longer.From Article 18.20 of the Texas Code of Criminal Procedure:"(15) "Electronic communication" means a transfer of signs, signals,writing, images, sounds, data, or intelligence of any naturetransmitted in whole or in part by a wire, radio, electromagnetic,photoelectronic, or photo-optical system. The term does notinclude:

(A) a wire or oral communication;(B) a communication made through a tone-only paging device; or(C) a co

Cool. Now we just have to define "wire communication" - and for that matter "oral communication" as it refers to audible signal, such as a 300 baud modem. Which the code may well cover - I'm kicking myself for mentally skipping over the reference in my first post.

Or do you think that the Bush admin has the scruples not to tap its allies?

I don't see why you think our government was doing the tapping. Every country spies on every other country - in recent years just off the top of my head I can think of incidents where the US government was spied on by Russia, France, the Phillipines, China, and Israel. Those were efforts that were discovered by the FBI - I'm sure they're just the tip of the iceberg.

Last I checked, Ericsson was a Swedish company (which, according to the article was the provider of the equipment). Also, one of the phones that was tapped was a US Embassy phone. Maybe the Swedes were spying on the Greeks--we should not forget that Sweden was an aspiring nuclear power [wagingpeace.org] (or read this [iht.com]). Maybe they want to become a superpower...

I'd think a foreign government would have to be bloody daft to accept any sort of tech built in the US where any sensitive communication is going to take place.
I don't think so. Vodafone is headquartered in Newbury, UK. So, Mr. Bond, don't bother to dissemble. And BTW, what WERE you doing with those communications? I thought of handicapping a book on the selection process.

You don't tap foreign officials for things to be "admissible in court" - you tap them so that you get the information of what their plans are.

Exactly. And it's not just foreign officials. A friend of mine worked for the SNP, a Scottish political party. They were warned on the first day that their phones were tapped and they should watch what is said.

The only scandal about Watergate was that they got caught.

Or do you think that the Bush admin has the scruples not to tap its allies?

Why do you specifically point out the Bush administration? I would imagine that most administrations since at least 1945 have had spy operations against allies. I'm sure right now we have assets (be it human or electronic) in place in the UK, and I'm sure they were there well before the Bush administration.

Yes, this has gone on for a long time, including financing of political groups. However, Greece is a NATO member and thus a close ally to USA, but is still treated ths way. Just imagine (or better, re

Bush's name drops in on this story because the taps don't appear to have been done for anything even vaguely resembling security reasons but for strictly commercial exploitation. Just like the NSA secret spying, how much of that information will end up in the hands of favoured corporations or be used in election campaigns or even just for straight up blackmail.

There is no indication the US was even involved, it could just be corporate spying, what is different between spyware on a computer and spyware on

Corporate espionage especially. It's been common practice for years to have American intelligence services pass on information to Boeing regarding Airbus' activities and vice versa. Helps in the bidding and design process a bit.

I sincerely doubt they were looking for "evidence" for a trial...I also doubt that it was either Greece or the US that did this. The conference calls were probably setup from the provider (Vodaphone's) side, not actually installed on the phone itself.

You're a bloody moron. As Kissinger told Meir, "That has nothing to do with this."

Of course Israel has a vested interested in what happens during the Olympics in Greece. What do you think would have happened to the Israeli athletes in Munich if Israeli intelligence had an inside line on what the Germans were planning?

Furthermore, you poison the well. Saying something about Israel that isn't glowing and praiseful is not antisemitism. Saying something about Israel slaughtering Palestinians is not an

The conference calls were probably setup from the provider (Vodaphone's) side

What's to stop Vodaphone from doing this with all of their phones? I imagine a few corporate executives would be looking long and hard at their mobile phones if they knew they were potentially tapped at purchase. The possibilites for corporate espionage are limitless, but perhaps the discovery of a few unauthorized corporate wiretaps is what it'll take to make people take a harder look at warrantless wiretapping in general.

One slight problem I can think of:-)1. Build encryptor for phones to hide nefarious deeds2. Authorities take interest in you3. Authorities tap your phone and find out that they can't decode your speech data4. Authorities go ".. Hmmm.. I wonder what he is hiding?" and throws mainframe full of cracking software at the problem.

At this point you are effectively putting head to head two computer systems:

1) The *hand held* device that you built to encode and decode speach in *real time* in order to hide what

I'm not saying that a phone couldn't be built.. and you point out that they are built.. but also are being cracked (which is what I was mainly alluding to happening in an arms race)The more general point I was trying to make (and badly) was that if the authorities are interested in you, then they will bring to bare on you as many resources as matches their interest. And that any small, portable device will never be a match for a much larger, more powerful device.

Could one not make 2 encryption devices that would go on either end of the phone conversation that are pre-populated with identical large sets of random data to be used as a one-time pad? Or some kind of real-time random number generators that share a common seed? Seems like that would be pretty tough to crack...

They are not targetting millions of people. They are doing traffic analysis on millions of people, and perhaps using word recognition on unencrypted traffic.So if I were a terrorist, I would use encryption and draw attention to my traffic, leading to further analysis.

And if I were an ordinary citizen, I would not normally use encryption (except perhaps for commercial secrets which I don't want *foreign* agencies grabbing) because I don't want to make the legitimate job of tracking terrorists harder. Unlike

Oh, I expect foolish free citizens to do their best to defeat a government agency which has as its purpose protection of the United States from terrorists.It does amaze me how quickly Americans have concluded that the terrorist threat is minor. Al Qaeda is very smart to launch their attacks elsewhere now and wait until they have something really nasty, like a nuke, before they attack us again. They didn't anticipate the ferocity of our first response. But they do study history, and know that the decadent we

Certainly the government should try to prevent them, to the extent that its methods of prevention are in accordance with and furtherance of the principles of liberty. If they aren't, what's the point? We'd be trading one tyrant for another. Forcing us to choose between terrorism and liberty is a false dilemma anyhow. Terrorism can be fought without compromising essential liberties.

I find this one of the most annoying arguments around. It is, to put it simply, ignorant or stupid - take your pick. Or to be mo

From official Greek sources, actually all high ranked officials have end-to-end encryption enabled handsets.
The problem is that many officials admitted that many times they do not use this feature because of the inconvenience, since both parties have to have them enabled. The same way we do not always enable gaim encyption even though we and I our geek friends went through the trouble to set it up once.

Dude, here, in the U.S. we oust the Powers that Be every two, six, and four to eight years.

The whole thing is done in public, with intense media coverage and participation. The Powers that Be and the Powers that Wish to Be participate openly in the proceedings, and each faction's ouster plans are hotly debated at all levels of our society for months and even years preceding an ouster event.

Oh really? You mean that all of the corporate boards are dissolved every 2, 4, and 8 years, and new boards are instated?

You mean that the Democratic and Republican parties are not more than 8 years old?

All that happens here in the US is that the two political parties trade off every several years. Currently, laws are written in private closed door sessions, when they are not directly written by the corporate interests themselves. Case in point, the recent consumer bankrupcy bill. It was literally writte

The qualities [that a president] is required to display are not those of leadership but those of finely judged outrage.... His job is not to wield power but to draw attention away from it. -- Douglas Adams

This sounds like an organized crime activity to me. Lots of cash flowing around and knowing people's secrets could be just what somebody needed to get a fat contract where they could skim millions. Follow the money and you'll probably find who did this, even if you cant prove it.

I wouldn't be surpriesd if organized crime here in the US hadn't figured out a way to tap into people's phone calls. The telepone companies don't seem to care who listens to our phone calls anymore.

It's time for end to end encryption of all communications. We should get an SSL session from one handset to the other.

Organized crime? I don't think so. Why would the organized crime care about what greek human right activists and anarchists talk about just before and during the 2006 Olympic Games in Athens?Something else that the fine article fails to mention is that the cells that the eavesdroppers used were spotted and all of them are very close and around the US embassy and most of the embassy people live in that area. There isn't any real doubt in Greece that the US embassy was at least involved.

This sounds like an organized crime activity to me. Lots of cash flowing around and knowing people's secrets could be just what somebody needed to get a fat contract where they could skim millions. Follow the money and you'll probably find who did this, even if you cant prove it.

Another possibility is that following the money leads somewhere which it would be politically incorrect to accuse.

I wouldn't be surpriesd if organized crime here in the US hadn't figured out a way to tap into people's phone call

Vodafone - one of the country's four mobile telephony providers - discovered the tapping after receiving complaints from customers over problems operating their phones.

"Hello, Vodaphone Greece. Yeah, I've got a complaint about my service. I think someone's tapping my phone. How can I tell? Every time I talk to my wife I hear heavy breathing that isn't hers, if you know what I mean..."

"Omykod, neighbor, I just discovered a webcame in MY shower, too! Chekkidout!"

"Wow dude, someone put that same keylogger on my laptop, too! Here it is, right in the process list on my Windows Task Manager!"

"Greek Allies: Thank you for sharing your concerns that we were behind the recent suspicious rerouting of cell phone calls made by your top government officials. As you can see from the attached mobile phone company records, our embassy has been a victim of this heinous eavesdropping as well. We look forward to working with you to find the Real Perpetrators. Sincerely, CIA Field Chief -REDACTED-"

Neighbours several houses down on the next street once bought a cheap baby intercom that ran on FM radio. It was rather suprising to be cycling through the channels fo find a new but rather gritty family sit-com, only to realize that events were actually synchronised to the events happening in their backyard.

I mean... c'mon. Everyone knows that at least one third party [echelonwatch.org] was already listening in on those conversations anyways. What's the surprise that someone else figured out a cheaper way to do it? That's just good geeks at work trying to impress the bean counters over at the GAO.

Note to self: two tinfoil hat posts in one sitting... I need to cut back on the Mt. Dews after lunchtime

AC wrote: If Echelon exists then why did Bush need to order illegal wiretaps of U.S. citizens calling overseas?

If you've read up on Echelon, you know it is designed to catch everything. It's almost like a huge crop harvest. You grab all of the crop and then pick out your prize specimens to enter in the county fair. Likewise, you sift through an enormous mish mash of communications traffic looking for something that stands out as informative and/or requiring some sort of action. If you've ever worked in th

These games are played all the time by foreign intelligence services. The most important question here is, if this was not a Greek agency that was behind the wiretapping, why didn't Greek counterintelligence know about this for so long?

2) Vodafone was notified by a Reseller, Q-Telecoms, about delays intext message delivery, after which they undertook an ad-hoc analysis.They found the software, supposedly a remotely activated Trojan (howthe hell could a Trojan get onto an SMS gateway?), by sheer luck, andthen disconnected the computer from the network.

3) The day after (2) the local security manager was discovered dead."Suicide", don't you know.

4) Ta Nea (http://digital.tanea.gr/ [tanea.gr]) are claiming it was the CIA,since the remote proxy used for collecting data appeared to lie in thevicinity of the American and / or British embassies. How amateurish isthat? Their motive was "Anti-Terrorism" before, during and evidentlyalso after the 2004 Olympics, which is no doubt why the list ofmobiles being tracked also included those of some prominent, and veryvery active (if you follow the news about bombs and firebombs at Greekbanks and ministries, you'll know what I mean) anarchists (notcommies, much more left wing than those boy-scouts).

It does seem that the extreme of either end is a dictatorship... and the dictatorships resemble each other it seems. Probably the reason is that the real spectrum is about human mindsets. I recently saw a documentary series on the origins of the 3 religions of Abraham: Judaism, Christianity and Islam. And the thing that struck me, and the narrator, was that in all the people who were interviewed the major difference was not between the religions but between the tolerant and the intolerant in the same reli

It does seem that the extreme of either end is a dictatorship... and the dictatorships resemble each other it seems.

I have heard this described this as the "line" being more of a circle, hence going very far left or very far right winds up in the same place.

I recently saw a documentary series on the origins of the 3 religions of Abraham: Judaism, Christianity and Islam. And the thing that struck me, and the narrator, was that in all the people who were interviewed the major difference was not between t

I don't see why you think capitalism needs government (unless you confuse it with present-day mercantilism), but what I was referring to in my post was the notion of anarchism being absence of money and trade, which is ridiculous. The only thing the government provides for trade and capitalism is fiat money, and that isn't really a benefit.

The only thing the government provides for trade and capitalism is fiat money, and that isn't really a benefit.

The things government can provide which are of potential benefit are standard weights & measures and enforcement of contracts.The former is explicitally in the US Constitution as a government function. Anyway fiat money is in no way essential to government anyway.

Come on. You know it was just the Olympic Committee making sure no one violated their trademark on the term "Olympics" [slashdot.org]. Because you know they have to protect the term "Olympics" [bbc.co.uk] so that know one else can make money off the word "Olympics" [bbc.co.uk]. If these officials where caught using the term Olympics [tmcnet.com] they could be in big trouble with the Olympic Committee. Hold on, someone's knocking on my door.....

I once heard a story about someone who claimed that they were being listened to. This person says that he heard an odd "clicking" and other bizzare noises when he was talking on his home land line. When he complained to the phone company, the repairman said his phone was wired really weird. He claimed that it was wired through to the company he used to work for. This was in the mid-nineties. I don't really trust the word of this person, but I would like to know if this has any validity.

Now, thanks to the wonder of Slashdot, I can ask multiple people who may know something about this.1) Is this story believable?2) Do you hear "clicks" if your phone line is being tapped?3) Can any private organization arrange to have another wire leading from another phone?

I once heard a story about someone who claimed that they were being listened to. This person says that he heard an odd "clicking" and other bizzare noises when he was talking on his home land line. When he complained to the phone company, the repairman said his phone was wired really weird. He claimed that it was wired through to the company he used to work for. This was in the mid-nineties. I don't really trust the word of this person, but I would like to know if this has any validity.

If you think this is news, it'll shudder you to your core to know that...brace yourself...the UN is also completely bugged. Been that way since the start.

A lot of you zombies think it's some good-hearted organization for finding lost puppies, but part of the Iraq-war intel came from there. And it stretches back all the way....I suppose to the Bay of Pigs or so.

It's not new; it's just new to you...part of how the world has always worked. Don't panic.

I am surprised that this story made headlines. In the age of electronic and wireless communications one should assume that all conservations are monitored, without exception (the only limiting factor being the cost, which is not that high nowadays). Just read some books of former spies and you can quickly understand that no small country is safe from spying. Today, saying that a politician's phone was tapped is like saying that Windoze is full of bugs. Expected news is no real news, and I cannot believe all

It is worth noting that only one of the three cellular network operators in Greece was providing services to the people whose phones were tapped, and that a day before the company notified the prime minister, one of the managers of that company was found burned in his house (reported as a suicide). The press also says that the company completely destroyed the surveillance software detected in its systems.

> > It "conference called" phone calls to 14 prepaid mobile phones where the calls were recorded.
> >That was clever. How did they get access to the phones to flash the programming? Phones worked fine otherwise. Makes me think someone had access to them at the factory. How else would they be able to get the source. Or would they need it?

One of three ways:

1) A backdoor in phones for snooping; either placed there by design/regulation in concert with the manufacturer, or slipped in by means of

No need to get all so "conspiracy FUD" about the phone companies loading code onto your phone. From the first article it says that "spyware" was loaded onto the central Vodafone server. Which is obviously the best place to attack the system. That way you can use the entire network as your spy infrastructure.

They (whoever "they" is) did it all from the telephone company switch.

This is exactly the same mechanism that is used for "proper" (IE: court ordered, law enforcement initiated) taps.

A command is issued in the switch that makes any future calls to or from the "target" phone part of a conference. The 3rd party in the conference would normally be a one-way audio device, that is connected to the police recording equipment.

In this case, it appears that the monitoring party was another cell phone (a pre-paid one, hard to track down who it belongs to).

The "hack" in this case, is really just an un-authorized use of an existing function in the telephone switching platform. It only takes a couple of commands, from a login with appropriate permissions, to do this.

All that stuff in the movies "..what was that, did you hear a click?" is bogus. I've been involved in a lot of testing of these and you can't tell that there's anything out of the ordinary going on.

I'm currently in Greece right now. What they officialy announced was that malicious code triggered a feature of the Ericsson systems Vodafone is using that "duplexes" phone calls. This feature is disabled in Greece by default (or should be anyway) because it is illegal. What is being heavily debated over right now is this: Once Vodafone's administrators found out about the malicious code and the whole illegal setup, they immediantly shut it down, hindering the task of finding the location of the 14 numbers

This feature is disabled in Greece by default (or should be anyway) because it is illegal
Disabled, sure, but it's a standard Ericsson (and every other phone switch maker, as well, I expect) feature. The code to make it happen is part of the system, and all that is needed to turn it on is a handfull of commands (restricted level commands typically issued by Ericsson).
The collection of Ericsson cell phone switches that I am currently sitting beside (4 of them) have a lot of features available in them, that

I'd guess that they probably got access at some stage during shipping, not at the factory, and swapped outbound phones with ones modded in at their leisure.

Never underestimate the power of even a simple device to spy. My favorite spy tool of all time was a plaque given to the US Embassy at Moscow by the Soviets in 1946. The US inspected it and determined that there was absolutely no way it could be bugged. It was;) It was a hollow cavity resonator - it had a large open space in the center with a simple wire in it. The vibration changed the capacitance between the diaphragm and the post plate, but there was no power source. It was not a bug on its own, but when the Soviets would broadcast a strong radio signal, an induced current would induce currents and stimulate a return broadcast at varying frequencies using the wire as an antenna, with frequency determined by the distance between the diaphragm and the post plate (which was determined by the sound impacting the diaphragm). I.e., a simple arrangement of metal became an FM transmitter when you broadcast radio waves at it.

That setup used rather primitive (by today's standards) technology, a modified movie camera that recorded the doc images on film -- putting the Xerox tech who swapped the film out at some risk, I imagine.Consider that today's copiers (and printers) are all digital and that it would be pretty trivial to have them store copies to flash memory for easy retrieval, either by a tech "running diagnostics" or over the wire or even wireless. (Heck, many copiers already have the built-in smarts to disallow copying/

I.e., a simple arrangement of metal became an FM transmitter when you broadcast radio waves at it.

That is... really ingenious.

Sorta reminds me of the 'sniffing' devices they hung from spy planes in Vietnam, that were supposed to detect traces of ammonia that would eminate from bomb-making facilities. They ended up bombing a lot of empty forest, with buckets of piss adorning the branches...

Those crazy super religious communists and facists! Killing all those millions of people in the name of Jesus! The mass murders of the 20th century, Stalin, Hitler, Pol Pot etc etc all were religious zealots!

honestly who the hell cares about this? People are getting tapped constantly in the US and elsewhere, how is this story even remotely interesting

It's interesting in many ways :

- it confirms what was previously just expected/suspected.

- The way in which it was done ( by installing software on the carrier's cell network that 'conferenced in prepaid phones' ) is definitely interesting.

- It was discovered.

Oh, and I've not read this anywhere else, but there's a post here which gives a few other details, including the mysterious "suicide" of one of the local security officials... not that I can tell you that it's anything real other than some radom dude posted something here, but still, that's interesting too, especially if true.

Anyway, I find it much more interesting than another RIM article or another CSS&HTML book review.

> Oh, and I've not read this anywhere else, but there's a post here> which gives a few other details, including the mysterious> "suicide" of one of the local security officials... not that I can> tell you that it's anything real other than some radom dude posted> something hereThe story of the Vodafone employee who was found dead two days after the discovery of the "spyware" has been in the TV news here (in Greece) and in some online news reports too. There was a "thorough investigation" by a

I found it pretty cool. Malicious code at the phone company's central office used to serupticiously record the conversations of top government officials and foreign diplomats? Way cool from a technical/geek standpoint.

Once upon a time, there was a dike. It was just a simple dike, nothing special. The dike was built, as dikes are, to stop water from flowing all over. One day though, someone decided to break a little bit of the dike. Nothing too drastic. Just a little water flowing out. What's the harm, y'know? In fact, it's helpful to the people nearby, since they get some free water! Thus, the whole wasn't fixed. But this little hole soon started to get larger. Alright...well the people are getting more free water now! But this hole kept on getting larger. Eventually, the hole was so large that the dike was of no use anymore. All the people who were getting free water could now be found under that water.

Now, to come back to the topic at hand: What happens when the government finds out that it is "okay" to eavesdrop on its own citizens? That the people don't care one bit about the whole thing. The government starts to do it more often. Eventually, it is too large to stop. I could very well bring up the Nazis, but I'd prefer to not violate Godwin's law.

Stories such as these raise awareness to the fact. I remember reading a comment earlier today about how the RIAA was purposely initiating frivolous lawsuits (Such as suing the person who never used a computer.) simply to remind people that they are still actively hunting those 'evil pirates.' The more people are aware, the more they participate. For example, in the late-1700s and early-1800s, the literacy rate throughout Europe started to rise. At the same time, the level of participation within politics also rose. One of the primary causes of the French Revolution (and the Terror that followed) was the use of newspapers to raise awareness amongst the populace.

There is a difference between people not caring, and people not knowing.That said, I'm not quite sure why you bring up the right to bear arms. I'm supposing that you simply cast me as someone who would be against it due to my previous post? On the contrary, I'm very well for the right to bear arms. The best way to stop a police state is with weapons. That is a case where you need quick action, for if the police state is allowed to continue for long, the people will be indoctrined towards it and would thus r

Something doesn't have to be wrong, for the need for secrecy to exist.Suppose someone has an embarassing (though legal) secret? The person listening could easily blackmail the individual. Or worse yet, what if it's a business conversation, and someone listening could easily profit? You don't think the US listens to other countries business communications, and passes the info to US corporations? Or other countries would spy on the US? Interesting...

In the U.S., we're talking about a nation that seems to have bugged members of the U.N. Security Council before the big vote on a second Iraq resolution. Hans Blix, the weapons inspector, also thought he'd been tapped by U.S. spy agencies. [globalpolicy.org]

It's not like the Executive Branch has just asserted its right to basically do what it pleases in the name of fighting terrorism, is it?

I understand your list of usual suspects, but something on the level of what's described doesn't sound like the Russians. Why would t

There was 1 phone in the US embassy bugged too. 1? Why only 1? Why only the USA Embassy?I reckon that's either to test it, or so it could be denied later ('well we were bugged too').

If it was Israel, China etc, I bet they'd bug all the western embassies - it would just be an extra line in a configuration file.

Plus I know a few Ericsson switch engineers and they are all US or UK contract staff which rules out China or Russia to me (but maybe that has changed, maybe Ericsson use Russian staff now?) and Turkey Cyprus or Albania, forget it! Where would they get switch engineers from?

I hate to jump to conclusions too, but it looks highly likely, especially given the domestic spying without warrant in the USA, and the UN Kofi Annan spying incident, and the claimed kidnapping of Greek citizens by US & UK agencies.

"A lot of "walk-ins" occur at embassies by people wanting to give information. Tapping the operator's phone and monitoring who calls would certainly be of use to counter-intelligence investigations."Because it's such a long shot. Your assuming a person will defect from the monitoring country, that the spy will call just 1 Embassy (not any other government or USA consulate), that the defector will call ahead of time instead of just walking in, that you will learn enough to be useful and that (since Greece is